Letters: Stevenson & Lang

ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 Church" is given as and. On that same page, line 2, "Moments of Vision" is confusingly cited not by the page number Berger ordinarily uses but by Gibson's poem number. Furthermore, the index entry to "Moments of Vision" on this page incorrectly gives the title of the poem as "Moments of Visions." Berger's failure to cite from the best existing critical editions —Kramer's for The Woodlanders and Gatrell's for Under the Greenwood Tree and Tess of the d'Urbervilles—seems to me to be part of this more general casualness about textual accuracy. In short, Berger's Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures does not fully live up to its claims "to grasp the texture of Hardy's visualizing language as it exists in all his writing" and to teach us "a new way to see them." But it is redeemed in part by often fine critical perceptions—some of which have the very useful function of making well-considered corrections of some major studies of Hardy. Robert C. Schweik SUNY College at Fredonia Letters: Stevenson & Lang Dear Stevenson: Letters from Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson with Five Letters from Stevenson to Lang. Marysa DeMoor, ed. Leuven: Uitgeverig Peeters, 1990. No price given. FOR THE AVERAGE reader of ELT (if there is such a creature) this morsel may prove tough chewing. Lang's letters are very personal, highly allusive, even cryptic (Stevenson must have wondered, at given moments, just what Lang was talking about), and largely devoid of literary graces. Lang did not intend any of them to be collected, edited, and published, and indeed very few of the surviving 4,500—some five percent—have been printed, and then in abridged form. As one reviews the evidence, reasons for the neglect of this vast correspondence go beyond the refusal of Lang's widow to allow scholars permission to edit the letters. The wide dispersal of an author's letters is not an insuperable problem, as Michael Millgate recently proved with his edition of Hardy's trove; determination can overcome that, and Marysa DeMoor, who has devoted "years of unremitting application" (I quote from her Editorial Note) to the deciphering and dating of Lang's letters, has plenty. But Lang's reputation as a critic suffered irreparable damage when the whole tradition of the man of letters, so formidable during the late Victorian Age, collapsed in the 1920s. There has never been a Lang revival, despite Lang's extraordinary credentials, his able championship of romantic fiction, his influential reviews (e.g., "At the 96 BOOK REVIEWS Sign of the Ship" in Longman's Magazine had a very wide readership), and his central position in the literary world of London for almost a full half-century. I agree with Morton Cohen's judgment that the 80s and 90s saw a "surge of interest in romance" because of Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, Henley, and Lang; though his name came last, Lang was not the least of the promoters. It is easy to over-emphasize the similarities between Lang and Stevenson. They were Scot Lowlanders, they enjoyed the same kinds of books, they even looked alike. Nevertheless, Sidney Colvin, who introduced them to each other at Menton, on the French Riviera, in the winter of 1873—1874, was struck by their difference in temperament and training. Lang was the very type of a young Oxford don (though his parents had been too poor to pay for his education), "fastidiously correct and reserved" (Colvin's phrase), and self-sacrificing; Stevenson, irregularly educated, tended to be more openly emotional, and certainly worried more about his own personal problems than Lang ever did. And indeed, it took a little time for the friendship to ripen; the end-product was a twenty-year chain of letters. Stevenson wrote more entertaining and discursive letters than Lang, and the published record of his correspondence to others suggests strongly that whatever he wrote to Lang during this lengthy period of time would have been well worth a reader's time. Regrettably, Lang made it a habit to destroy his incoming mail (all of it), and three of the five RLS letters printed here...